Yes, COBOL, when compared with any modern language, sucks, because it just sports a dozen features instead of 1200. The thing is: those features are rock-solid. and this is why COBOL is still in use and programs written in the 70s still run flawlessly
I also think it's safe to assume that Apple is the seller of the item.
Actually not, here in Italy Apple sells a lot through non-Apple-branded channels (independent retailers, consumer electronic chains, etc.), also giiven the fact that we have just a handful of Apple Stores, and in all these cases the "seller" (as defined by the European Directive) is the retailer itself, not Apple. The fine was levied due to abuses perpetrated by Apple in its stores and on its site, so in these cases the manufacturer and the seller are the same entity. An Apple customer who used a generic retailer could "sue" the retailer (the "seller") but of course the outcome would/could be different.
Quite the contrary: Jobs wanted to cancel or downsize almost everything else in order to support the Macintosh. What everybody seems to have forgotten is that, despite the good reception both by reviewers and the general public, the first Mac wasn't selling well: sales basically slowed down to a crawl in the second half of 1984 (when sales of the Apple II still contributed to 70% of Apple's revenue), and in March 1985 they amounted to 1/10th of the forecast. Jobs was forced to leave because hiis decisions, and his stubborness when confronted with the need to change them, were turning an innovative and promising product into a possible half-baked venture, and ultimately damaging to the whole company.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount
You don't buy retail in quantity 500. Volume deals drop the price to something like $50-70. Besides, you can't simply add costs up, come up with a large number and wave it in the air. If you have 500 employees you have far greater expenses, and you have even greater profit that those employees make.
There is one more thing in business, it is called COGS. It reduces the effective cost of a tool, and MS Office is a tool. So you have now a competition between a cheap top-notch tool and a free but somewhat weirder tool. What will you, as a business leader, buy? I think the decision is preordained here.
To be fair it should be said that the US$ 130 price (about the same in EUR) is for the Product Key Card versiion, a sort of not-activated OEM where the supplier of the PC bundles the software and you can optionally activate it buying a so-called "license card". Prices for a full license of Office Home and Business 2010 start from 220$ on Amazon. Not that this matters, given that most businesses are going to buy Open/volume licenses anyway.
The problem I have with Vlingo, or Google voice actions, is that they only work in English. While I have no problem in saying "Call" instead of "Chiama" (in Italian) I would have to "translate" the pronounciation of my contacts'names into English, for Google to be able to find them. This is immensely awkward and, by the way, doesn't work well (I tried). It's a pity, also because Google's voice recognition engine works very well in Italian (Voice Search works, Voice Actions do not) and a major usability hurdle: my old Nokia N70 allows to make a completely hands-free call while my new Desire HD does not. VoicePod is the only software that seems to work, but it doesn't support Bluettoth headphones.
The people behind Diaspora decided to shoot themselves in the foot when they published a software implementation with no documentation of design, protocols, etc. I just checked and no technical documentation seems to be readily available (actually I had to resort to Wikipedia to find a link to their forum), something can be probably found in bits and pieces on the support forums, but obviously it is not enough for a project whose aims are so far-reaching. To add insulto to injury, the implementation they're running with is in Ruby: now, seriously, I don't have anything against Ruby and I think diversity in programming environments is a great thing because it's what ultimately innovation comes from. But if you want to get help, support and, ultimately, code from the community, you're supposed to use a language that is more widely used so that people can get up to speed more quickly with your codebase, especially when the documentation isn't there.
No, it's typical for software written by people who don't understand the meaning of the word interoperability, or who were not given specifications in that direction. Yes, if you want to use Mono to run a large.Net project you have to plan in advance, but even if you decide to stay with the Windows backend, there's no reason not to have cross-platform clients, including mobile and web access; in your case it's just bad software design and even poorer planning that prevents them from existing. And, of course, you could also use Mono and have your backend on your OS of choice.
The real problem with VB.Net is that it tries too hard to stay compatible with its awful and numbingly failure-prone predecessor (VB6). If you just activate a couple of language features ("option strict", etc.) VB.Net is actually a modern and well behaved language: there's no automatic type conversion, late binding is disabled, etc. Of course, when you do that, you also find out that writing directly in C# is much faster...
The real problem is that there is no small-size or really hackish solution for this kind of requirements: you need a PC semi-permanently connected to your cash register, a programming manual - this stuff uses proprietary protocols - and from there on it just depends on what you want to do: but you DO need something to log the transactions and parse/query your data (which might well be a Perl script or something somebody else slapped together). Daily reports *on the cash register* are only available on high-end models anyway, which you probably don't have in a very small shop, so your distinction between small and big shops is moot.
... modern cash registers simply output on a serial or USB port all the transaction data entered, and receive informations on goods for PLUs (Price Look-Ups): when a barcode on a product is scanned, the cash register "asks" to a server the corresponding price and description to be printed on your receipt, etc. Most cash registers are actually (at least here in Italy, and in a reasonably sized shop) just a specialized keyboard/screen/cash drawer connected to a PC, which in turn sits on a network: it's all part of a turn-key system, maintenance included. It's not like you go and read the data *from* the cash register: while you can query it for some daily report, you usually just store the data on a server and use some custom app or a DB frontend to read it.
Actually it was quite the opposite: the original A1000 started from a Kickstart floppy, after which a Workbench (the desktop environment) floppy was needed. Later OS revisions (1.2/1.3? Sorry, I can't remember) had KS in ROM and only needed the Workbench floppy (or an HD install)
Just a minor point: SIAE is not the same as RIAA. SIAE is the body who has the duty to apply the regulations and laws concerning copyright protection and payment of rights-derived shares to artists. AFI (Associazione dei Fonografici Italiani) is an organization much more similar in scope to RIAA.
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Yes, COBOL, when compared with any modern language, sucks, because it just sports a dozen features instead of 1200. The thing is: those features are rock-solid. and this is why COBOL is still in use and programs written in the 70s still run flawlessly
... what happened to the cat?
I also think it's safe to assume that Apple is the seller of the item.
Actually not, here in Italy Apple sells a lot through non-Apple-branded channels (independent retailers, consumer electronic chains, etc.), also giiven the fact that we have just a handful of Apple Stores, and in all these cases the "seller" (as defined by the European Directive) is the retailer itself, not Apple. The fine was levied due to abuses perpetrated by Apple in its stores and on its site, so in these cases the manufacturer and the seller are the same entity.
An Apple customer who used a generic retailer could "sue" the retailer (the "seller") but of course the outcome would/could be different.
Quite the contrary: Jobs wanted to cancel or downsize almost everything else in order to support the Macintosh. What everybody seems to have forgotten is that, despite the good reception both by reviewers and the general public, the first Mac wasn't selling well: sales basically slowed down to a crawl in the second half of 1984 (when sales of the Apple II still contributed to 70% of Apple's revenue), and in March 1985 they amounted to 1/10th of the forecast. Jobs was forced to leave because hiis decisions, and his stubborness when confronted with the need to change them, were turning an innovative and promising product into a possible half-baked venture, and ultimately damaging to the whole company.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/1002.html
Not really an issue for Italy since the last reactor was shut dowin in 1990
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount
You don't buy retail in quantity 500. Volume deals drop the price to something like $50-70. Besides, you can't simply add costs up, come up with a large number and wave it in the air. If you have 500 employees you have far greater expenses, and you have even greater profit that those employees make.
There is one more thing in business, it is called COGS. It reduces the effective cost of a tool, and MS Office is a tool. So you have now a competition between a cheap top-notch tool and a free but somewhat weirder tool. What will you, as a business leader, buy? I think the decision is preordained here.
To be fair it should be said that the US$ 130 price (about the same in EUR) is for the Product Key Card versiion, a sort of not-activated OEM where the supplier of the PC bundles the software and you can optionally activate it buying a so-called "license card". Prices for a full license of Office Home and Business 2010 start from 220$ on Amazon. Not that this matters, given that most businesses are going to buy Open/volume licenses anyway.
The problem I have with Vlingo, or Google voice actions, is that they only work in English. While I have no problem in saying "Call" instead of "Chiama" (in Italian) I would have to "translate" the pronounciation of my contacts'names into English, for Google to be able to find them. This is immensely awkward and, by the way, doesn't work well (I tried). It's a pity, also because Google's voice recognition engine works very well in Italian (Voice Search works, Voice Actions do not) and a major usability hurdle: my old Nokia N70 allows to make a completely hands-free call while my new Desire HD does not. VoicePod is the only software that seems to work, but it doesn't support Bluettoth headphones.
The people behind Diaspora decided to shoot themselves in the foot when they published a software implementation with no documentation of design, protocols, etc. I just checked and no technical documentation seems to be readily available (actually I had to resort to Wikipedia to find a link to their forum), something can be probably found in bits and pieces on the support forums, but obviously it is not enough for a project whose aims are so far-reaching. To add insulto to injury, the implementation they're running with is in Ruby: now, seriously, I don't have anything against Ruby and I think diversity in programming environments is a great thing because it's what ultimately innovation comes from. But if you want to get help, support and, ultimately, code from the community, you're supposed to use a language that is more widely used so that people can get up to speed more quickly with your codebase, especially when the documentation isn't there.
No, it's typical for software written by people who don't understand the meaning of the word interoperability, or who were not given specifications in that direction. Yes, if you want to use Mono to run a large .Net project you have to plan in advance, but even if you decide to stay with the Windows backend, there's no reason not to have cross-platform clients, including mobile and web access; in your case it's just bad software design and even poorer planning that prevents them from existing. And, of course, you could also use Mono and have your backend on your OS of choice.
The real problem with VB.Net is that it tries too hard to stay compatible with its awful and numbingly failure-prone predecessor (VB6). If you just activate a couple of language features ("option strict", etc.) VB.Net is actually a modern and well behaved language: there's no automatic type conversion, late binding is disabled, etc. Of course, when you do that, you also find out that writing directly in C# is much faster...
The real problem is that there is no small-size or really hackish solution for this kind of requirements: you need a PC semi-permanently connected to your cash register, a programming manual - this stuff uses proprietary protocols - and from there on it just depends on what you want to do: but you DO need something to log the transactions and parse/query your data (which might well be a Perl script or something somebody else slapped together). Daily reports *on the cash register* are only available on high-end models anyway, which you probably don't have in a very small shop, so your distinction between small and big shops is moot.
... modern cash registers simply output on a serial or USB port all the transaction data entered, and receive informations on goods for PLUs (Price Look-Ups): when a barcode on a product is scanned, the cash register "asks" to a server the corresponding price and description to be printed on your receipt, etc. Most cash registers are actually (at least here in Italy, and in a reasonably sized shop) just a specialized keyboard/screen/cash drawer connected to a PC, which in turn sits on a network: it's all part of a turn-key system, maintenance included. It's not like you go and read the data *from* the cash register: while you can query it for some daily report, you usually just store the data on a server and use some custom app or a DB frontend to read it.
Actually it was quite the opposite: the original A1000 started from a Kickstart floppy, after which a Workbench (the desktop environment) floppy was needed. Later OS revisions (1.2/1.3? Sorry, I can't remember) had KS in ROM and only needed the Workbench floppy (or an HD install)
Did you also happen to buy and store a 30-years-worth supply of chemicals (and a processing machine) for E-6?
That was an (obvious but maybe that's me...) Simpsons reference
Not me, but probably the fact that I live a few thousand miles from Edwards AFB helped somehow...
Just a minor point: SIAE is not the same as RIAA. SIAE is the body who has the duty to apply the regulations and laws concerning copyright protection and payment of rights-derived shares to artists. AFI (Associazione dei Fonografici Italiani) is an organization much more similar in scope to RIAA.